~ Tracking the next generation of writers

Tag Archives: Top 5

This week’s Top 5 is a day late because, frankly, I got caught up watching the Oscars. Fortunately, this week’s picks all have a certain cinematic quality to them that seems all the more appropriate to showcase. As always, these are not meant to be any kind of ranking, just pieces I think more people ought to read.

1. “For Good,” by Melissa Goodrich (University of Arizona)

Scene shifts can be difficult to pull off in fiction, but Goodrich manages to jump from room to room and from place to place in a way that reflects the tendency of our own thoughts to cut to spaces outside of ourselves. This story’s narrator exists both within her own body and everywhere around it. A solid study in interiority.

Here is a poem that breathes life into a single scene with some pretty harsh clarity. It’s as much about what’s said as what isn’t and it’s as much about what you can see as all the things just out of reach.

3. “When I Think About It, I Like the Phrase ‘Losing Touch’,” by Ezra Stewart-Silver (University of Florida)

Again, this is a poem that sets up a scene, one that’s elegant and simple. It’s a meditation on closeness and distance and how it is to go from one to the other, one made all the more poignant by the arm’s reach the reader is kept at by the language.

I love a story that can walk the line between realism and fantasy, one that understands the mutability of things and how our own perceptions can betray us. Here is a story about roaches and things that are not roaches and things that might as well be roaches.

5. “Broken English,” by Aaron Teel (Washington University in St. Louis)

Another piece of short-short fiction, this is fiction that reminds us how much things like plot and theme can be expressed just through description. Teel gives us a strange and familiar (strangely familiar?) world and then offers us consequences that seem perfectly natural. Under the circumstances, that is.

Like this:

Looking through all the various online publications collected here, I stumble across a few pieces that I really like. Every week I’ll be showcasing some of them here. As always, mine is not a ranking or meant to comment on the universities represented here. These are simply a handful of writers whose work I admired.

Here’s a story about radioactive cows. And if that doesn’t interest you, then I’d direct you to My. Linforth’s unique style and attention to the emotions of his characters who find themselves caught up in the machinations of complicated systems. Fans of Ben Fountain will certainly enjoy.

This is one of those essays that could very easily be read as fiction. It’s brief, but manages with lyricism and humor to just hint at bigger worlds and greater questions while still making use of the authenticity characteristic of the personal essay.

3. “And Science is a turtle that says that its own shell encloses all things,” by Justin Carter (Bowling Green State University)

As somebody with a background in the sciences, I’m always looking for people who are able to create that world on paper. Here Carter manages to do just that by holding up a mirror to the sometimes-absurdity of rational thought. But, rather than falling into the classic trap of “Science=Hubris=Bad,” this is a poem that manages to retain some of the mind-expanding wonder that science and discovery has brought us.

Flash fiction never gets enough love, in my opinion, though it often combines some of the best elements of prose and poetry. This short piece demonstrates, to me, the sort of fiction that is just pleasurable to read and to read aloud. While there’s not much room for plot, the craft of each individual sentence more than makes up the difference.

In the same way that shorter fiction can step away from plot, this is the sort of piece that achieves in just a few paragraphs what some novelists can’t do given an entire chapter. LaRowe sets up scenes that are not only fleshed-out in the present, but which are in posession of a clear past and a tangible future.

Like this:

As I scour the web collecting the works of today’s emerging writers I try to read as much as possible. Those I particularly like I’ll be posting here each week. They aren’t in any particular order and should not be construed in any way as a commentary on the schools listed. I just liked them.

Ms. Klippenstein, a fiction student at Cornell, won the Zoetrope: All-Story Fiction Contest in 2012 with this semi-speculative piece about culture, family, and trying to keep from floating away. The contest was judged by Pulitzer nominee Karen Russel and if you’re a fan of hers you’re likely to see more than a little influence in this short story:

Mr. Kalscheur’s poem makes use of the eye of a naturalist and recalls for me some of the best points of writers like Anthony Doerr and Katherine Larson. Deceptively simple, it’s one that stuck with me a while after reading.

Normally I’m a fan of long sprawling paragraphs, but the way Ms. Barkmeier’s story unfolds in small staccato moments offers a peculiar sort of meditation that works, in no small part, due to her hyper-efficient language.

I don’t pretend to know too much about poetry but I do, as the say, know what I like. And Mr. McRae’s piece here brings together some of my favorite elements from both verse and prose in very interesting ways. A beautiful piece.

5. “What Does Not Belong in Calvary Cemetary,” by Thomas Mira y Lopez (University of Arizona)

Whenever I try to convince people to give Creative Non-Fiction a try, this is always the sort of piece I use to bait them. It’s ostensibly a travel narrative, focusing on a place, but the essay moves in some subtle and downright subversive ways.